From bleak to beauty: Grand designs to transform an unloved city block

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there would be few who look at 114 William Street in Woolloomooloo and think: that’s beautiful.

An empty piece of land owned by the government since it carved the eastern distributor through the city, it is at least 3000 square metres of prime real estate that is currently little more than an ad-hoc outdoor carpark for M1 staff.

The vacant block of prime land owned by Transport for NSW on William Street in Woolloomooloo.Credit: Cole Bennetts

Which made it the ideal ground zero for a competition launched on Tuesday night by Street Level Australia, a burgeoning urban lobby group pursuing greater beauty, diversity and resilience in the architecture of Australian cities.

The group’s founder Milly Main, a former corporate consultant, doesn’t think beauty is subjective. “If I show you a beautiful picturesque Venice landscape, or if you walk down a beautiful street in Kyoto or Paris, that’s beautiful. And to deny it is actually just facetious,” she says. “There are obviously things that are beautiful ... to deny that is really doing ourselves a disservice.”

The contest - called Sydney is Beautiful - received 13 local and international entries that reimagine the disused William Street eyesore as everything from a sandstone apartment building to a grand Parisian hotel.

The winning design from Sydney-based M. J. Suttie architects.

A blind jury chose the vision of Sydney-based architectural practice M.J.Suttie as its winner. This entry proposed not only a seven-storey, neoclassical sandstone structure fronting William Street, but the reimagined Palmer Street as a pedestrian boulevard running north to the Domain, where it would meet a new public plaza, Bungaree, and a museum, the Institute of Traditional Urbanism.

One of the judges, architecture professor Richard Economakis from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, said the winning entry projected a holistic vision of urban growth that returned to the historical norm before car-based sprawl took over in the 1950s and ’60s.

“There’s a clear understanding of what the block is and what the street is ... it’s a good height for William Street,” Economakis said. “It incorporates an inner open space, the courtyard ... and proposes the same sort of system going forward for filling in the urban fabric.”

In addition to the main building, the architects also reimagined Palmer Street as a pedestrian boulevard leading to a new public plaza.

The judges awarded second prize to a more "vernacular" entry by Winston Grant-Preece which they said had the most Sydney flavour to it, and commended designs by UK-based ADAM Architecture and the US practice Historical Concepts.

Cities Minister Rob Stokes presented Premier Dominic Perrottet's pick of the bunch at the launch on Tuesday evening, designed by local firm Hector Abrahams Architects. He also commended a youth entry by high school students John Paul Foong and Joseph Foong.

Stokes lamented that Sydney was chosen as the set for the 1999 film The Matrix because the CBD skyline is so generic and bland. "We want places that are not vanilla but toward a vernacular," he said.

Professor of Architecture Richard Economakis said this entry from Winston Grant-Preece was the “most Sydney” of all the ideas.

"When we look at Sydney we [want to] see a reflection of ourselves, not of New York, not of London, not of Paris, not of Berlin, not of Shanghai."

The government did not solicit, approve or oversee the competition, and there is no suggestion any of the designs will ever see the light of day. When the Herald asked Transport for NSW about the Woolloomooloo “ghost block” for a story in 2021, it said the land was no longer needed for operational purposes and its future use would be reviewed.

Main, the Street Level Australia founder, said the competition’s purpose was to spur conversation about better ways to construct places - particularly better in-fill redevelopment of existing areas. “Part of the holdup and the tension is that new density is 99 per cent of the time horrifically ugly,” We’ve got a political problem because nobody wants the density to be near them,” Main said.

A commended design submitted by UK-based ADAM Architecture.

“Imagine if we could take our cues from Paris or cities that have actually planned beautiful places at a precinct level. If we want density to happen we cannot keep opening up the vacuum to this crappy development. We need to think about beauty to solve sprawl.”

Main said the goal was not to recreate or imitate historical styles but to learn from the past. As for successful examples of modern urbanism, she suggests Le Plessis-Robinson in France, Brandevoort in the Netherlands and the UK’s Poundbury - a planned community endorsed and heavily guided by King Charles III.

Closer to home, she said Jindee - a fledgling seaside suburb north of Perth - had the makings of a special, successful urban creation.

A commended entry by Atlanta and New York-based architectural firm Historical Concepts, for a grand hotel.

Low-lying, low-rise Woolloomooloo, between the Sydney CBD and Kings Cross, has been ripe for reimagining for decades and has attracted attention from many architects and urban planners.

Last year the Herald revealed a radical vision for the Domain and Woolloomooloo by Grimshaw Architects, which would turn the Domain carpark into a new performing arts precinct with four concert halls, and drive the urban renewal of William Street and the surrounding blocks.

The entries in the Sydney is Beautiful competition are on public exhibition at Glebe Town Hall from 9am to 12pm on Wednesday.

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